Deeplinks Blog posts about Wikileaks

The success of Wikileaks in obtaining and releasing information has inspired mainstream media outlets to develop proprietary copycat sites. Al-Jazeera got into the act first, launching the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU), an initiative meant to "allow Al-Jazeera's supporters to shine light on notable and noteworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported." AJTU assures users that "files will be uploaded and stored on our secure servers" and that materials "are encrypted while they are transmitted to us, and they remain encrypted on our servers."

When governments and companies assemble on an international level to discuss "Internet freedom," EFF's policy experts go on alert. All too frequently, government-level discussions about Internet freedom turn into opportunities to discuss tangential issues, many of which have negative implications on online freedom: laws and policies promoting censorship and surveillance on the Internet. With that in mind, EFF attended the Council of Europe (CoE) meeting on Internet Freedom: From Principles to Global Treaty Law? to ensure that European countries’ fundamental values--human rights, democracy and the rule of law--are upheld. EFF went in prepared to fight any attempt to promote pervasive spying proposals or government attempts to control the Internet. The Council of Europe largely succeeded in fostering a positive, rights-centered tone at the meeting.

EFF recently launched a campaign calling on companies to stand with their users when the government comes looking for data. (If you haven’t done so, sign our petition urging companies to provide better transparency and privacy.) This article will provide a more detailed look at one of the four categories in which a company can earn a gold star in our campaign: promising to tell users about government data demands.

What happens when governments go to your online service providers seeking information about you? Birgitta Jonsdottir, Rop Gonggijp and Jacob Appelbaum use online social networks to communicate about social and political causes – including their support for the online whistleblower website Wikileaks. But their decision to back Wikileaks drew the attention of the U.S. government.

In connection with its investigation into Wikileaks, the Department of Justice issued a secret order to Twitter demanding the account information of Birgitta, Rop and Jacob. The order included a "gag" – meaning Twitter wasn’t allowed to talk about it. In fact, it wasn’t even allowed to tell Birgitta, Rop and Jacob about the government order for their account information.

March 14-18, 2011 is “Sunshine Week”—a week to focus on the importance of open government and how we can ensure accountability for our leaders at the federal, state and local levels.

In the year since Sunshine Week 2010, the world of open government has been rocked by the WikiLeaks leaks. Early last April, WikiLeaks released a video of a 2007 US Army air attack in Baghdad that left 12 dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. This wasn’t the first controversial information the site ever posted, but it swiftly put WikiLeaks in the center of a dialogue about what information the public has a right to access and whether releasing that information will put lives and national security at risk.